Melbourne Meeting – April 2005

April 2005

Recursion and Linked Lists – Roger Connell

Early Pascal texts dealt extensively with managing dynamically allocated data via linked lists and with recursion in procedures. With Delphi the dynamic data tends to be allocated as objects and these objects are typically managed in containers such as TObjectList. In this presentation Roger looked at what can happen if you manage these objects as a linked list and how recursion can really make it rock. Slides and code here

Organizing Program Constant Data – Don Macrae

You can set it in components at design time, which results in a game of hunt the thimble if you need to change it, or you can embed it in your code, with similar effect. Most programs embody constant values, and where it resides makes a difference to maintainability and readability. Record consts are the answer. Don shared several examples, and invited judgements.

Lots of applications have free text data stored in files or databases. Internet search engines are pretty good at helping us find information on the web. But how can we do that in our own application and what sort of data can we find?

Graham looked at some of the more common options available, how they work and how you might make use of them in your own applications.